We show examples of how low-level, qualitative neuroanatomical hemispheric differences can give rise to detailed psychologically realistic behaviour. We illustrate this claim with examples from the cognitive modelling of unilateral visuospatial neglect and neglect dyslexia. Our models are based on two principles: the division of information processing between the two hemispheres; and the implem...

PURPOSE The interest in human conscious awareness has increasingly propelled the study of neglect, the most striking occurrence of an acquired lack of conscious experience of space. Neglect syndromes commonly arise after unilateral brain damage that spares primary sensory areas nonetheless leading to a lack of conscious stimulus perception. Because of the central role of vision in our everyday ...

Unilateral spatial neglect is a common neurological syndrome following predominantly right hemisphere injuries and is characterized by both spatial and non-spatial deficits. Core spatial deficits involve mechanisms for saliency coding, spatial attention, and short-term memory and occur in conjunction with nonspatial deficits that involve reorienting, target detection, and arousal/vigilance. We ...

Prism adaptation has been shown to temporarily ameliorate the symptoms of unilateral neglect. The underlying mechanisms of change are not yet fully understood. In this study, we investigate the influence of this treatment on attentional orienting under conditions of exogenous (peripheral onset) and endogenous (central symbolic) cueing. In one patient with left visual extinction and recovered ne...

Previous studies that investigated the association of numbers and space in humans came to contradictory conclusions about the spatial character of the mental number magnitude representation and about how it may be influenced by unilateral spatial neglect. The present study aimed to disentangle the debated influence of perceptual vs. representational aspects via explicit mapping of numbers onto ...

OBJECTIVES Unilateral sensory neglect has been attributed to various defects, including a hemispatial attention-arousal deficit. However, support for this hypothesis has only been indirect. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to further test the hemispatial attentional-arousal hypothesis by measuring pupillary response as an index of arousal. METHODS There were two experimental subjects ...

Previous work has shown that various symptoms of unilateral neglect, including the pathological shift of the subjective midline to the right, may be improved by a short adaptation period to a prismatic shift of the visual field to the right. We report here, in two neglect patients the improvement of imagery neglect after prism exposure. Despite a strong neglect observed for mental images, as we...